Approximate Computing Survey, Part II: Application-Specific & Architectural Approximation Techniques and Applications

The challenging deployment of compute-intensive applications from domains such Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP), forces the community of computing systems to explore new design approaches. Approximate Computing appears as an emerging solution, allowing to tune the quality of results in the design of a system in order to improve the energy efficiency and/or performance. This radical paradigm shift has attracted interest from both academia and industry, resulting in significant research on approximation techniques and methodologies at different design layers (from system down to integrated circuits). Motivated by the wide appeal of Approximate Computing over the last 10 years, we conduct a two-part survey to cover key aspects (e.g., terminology and applications) and review the state-of-the art approximation techniques from all layers of the traditional computing stack. In Part II of our survey, we classify and present the technical details of application-specific and architectural approximation techniques, which both target the design of resource-efficient processors/accelerators & systems. Moreover, we present a detailed analysis of the application spectrum of Approximate Computing and discuss open challenges and future directions.Comment: Under Review at ACM Computing Survey

ON OPTIMIZATIONS OF VIRTUAL MACHINE LIVE STORAGE MIGRATION FOR THE CLOUD

Virtual Machine (VM) live storage migration is widely performed in the data cen- ters of the Cloud, for the purposes of load balance, reliability, availability, hardware maintenance and system upgrade. It entails moving all the state information of the VM being migrated, including memory state, network state and storage state, from one physical server to another within the same data center or across different data centers. To minimize its performance impact, this migration process is required to be transparent to applications running within the migrating VM, meaning that ap- plications will keep running inside the VM as if there were no migration operations at all. In this dissertation, a thorough literature review is conducted to provide a big picture of the VM live storage migration process, its problems and existing solutions. After an in-depth examination, we observe that a severe IO interference between the VM IO threads and migration IO threads exists and causes both types of the IO threads to suffer from performance degradation. This interference stems from the fact that both types of IO threads share the same critical IO path by reading from and writing to the same shared storage system. Owing to IO resource contention and requests interference between the two different types of IO requests, not only will the IO request queue lengthens in the storage system, but the time-consuming disk seek operations will also become more frequent. Based on this fundamental observation, this dissertation research presents three related but orthogonal solutions that tackle the IO interference problem in order to improve the VM live storage migration performance. First, we introduce the Workload-Aware IO Outsourcing scheme, called WAIO, to improve the VM live storage migration efficiency. Second, we address this problem by proposing a novel scheme, called SnapMig, to improve the VM live storage migration efficiency and eliminate its performance impact on user applications at the source server by effectively leveraging the existing VM snapshots in the backup servers. Third, we propose the IOFollow scheme to improve both the VM performance and migration performance simultaneously. Finally, we outline the direction for the future research work. Advisor: Hong Jian

DeltaFS: Pursuing Zero Update Overhead via Metadata-Enabled Delta Compression for Log-structured File System on Mobile Devices

Data compression has been widely adopted to release mobile devices from intensive write pressure. Delta compression is particularly promising for its high compression efficacy over conventional compression methods. However, this method suffers from non-trivial system overheads incurred by delta maintenance and read penalty, which prevents its applicability on mobile devices. To this end, this paper proposes DeltaFS, a metadata-enabled Delta compression on log-structured File System for mobile devices, to achieve utmost compressing efficiency and zero hardware costs. DeltaFS smartly exploits the out-of-place updating ability of Log-structured File System (LFS) to alleviate the problems of write amplification, which is the key bottleneck for delta compression implementation. Specifically, DeltaFS utilizes the inline area in file inodes for delta maintenance with zero hardware cost, and integrates an inline area manage strategy to improve the utilization of constrained inline area. Moreover, a complimentary delta maintenance strategy is incorporated, which selectively maintains delta chunks in the main data area to break through the limitation of constrained inline area. Experimental results show that DeltaFS substantially reduces write traffics by up to 64.8\%, and improves the I/O performance by up to 37.3\%

Extensões para a compressão Base-Delta-Imediato

Orientador: Rodolfo Jardim de AzevedoDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Memórias cache há muito têm sido utilizadas para reduzir os problemas decorrentes da discrepância de desempenho entre a memória e o processador: muitos níveis de caches on-chip reduzem a latência média de memória ao custo de área e energia extra no die. Para diminuir o dispêndio desses componentes extras, técnicas de compressão de cache são usadas para armazenar dados comprimidos e permitir um aumento de capacidade de cache. Este projeto apresenta extensões para a Compressão Base-Delta-Imediato, várias modificações da técnica original que minimizam a quantidade de bits de preenchimento numa compressão através da flexibilização dos tamanhos de delta permitidos para cada base e do aumento do número de bases. As extensões foram testadas utilizando ZSim, avaliadas contra métodos estado da arte, e os resultados de desempenho foram comparados e avaliados para determinar a validade de utilização das técnicas propostas. Foi constatado um aumento do fator de compressão médio de 1.37x para 1.58x com um aumento de energia tão baixo quanto 27%Abstract: Cache memories have long been used to reduce problems deriving from the memory-processor performance discrepancy: many levels of on-chip cache reduce the average memory latency at the cost of extra die area and power. To decrease the outlay of these extra components, cache compression techniques are used to store compressed data and allow a cache capacity boost. This project introduces extensions to the Base-Delta-Immediate Compression, many modifications of the original technique that minimize the quantity of padding bits by relaxing the allowed delta sizes for each base and increasing number of bases. The extensions were tested using ZSim, evaluated against state-of-the-art methods, and the performance results were compared and evaluated to determine the validity of the proposed techniques. We verified an improvement of the original BDI compression factor from 1.37x to 1.58x at a energy increase as low as 27%MestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computação1564395CAPE